According to a new study, OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool can respond to patient inquiries with greater empathy than human doctors.
Why it matters: It seems that robots can surpass even our humanity.
Information: For the study, which was published Friday in the academic journal JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers from the University of California San Diego, La Jolla, randomly selected 200 patient questions from Reddit’s AskDocs forum.
Then both human doctors and ChatGPT answered the questions.
They had a clinical team evaluate both of the answers to each of the questions, rating them on the quality of the answers and the empathy demonstrated.
The chatbot won. It wasn’t close.
Evaluators preferred the response by the computer nearly 80% of the time over the human doctor’s answer.
What they’re saying: “It’s pretty obvious why AI was better. It’s not constrained by time,” lead author John Ayers, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Diego, La Jolla told Axios.
“You could take a simple query like: ‘I have a headache, can you help me?’ and you’ll immediately see ChatGPT say ‘I’m sorry you have a headache,'” Ayers said. “The doctor knows that, they feel that. They don’t have time to say it.”
